Review: How to Paint a Dead Man

At first glance, the title suggests a murder mystery — or a particularly macabre art textbook.

Four diverse stories, tenuously linked, form Sarah Hall’s fourth novel, How To Paint A Dead Man. Each story could reasonably be read independently, but in combination become a beautiful and unusual work.

The novel begins and ends with arguably its most powerful and emotional link, The Mirror Crisis. Suze and Danny are twins, with the type of mysterious bond that twins are often said to share. A tragic accident, and Suze is severed from Danny forever. Hall depicts Suze’s grief with vivid intensity and heartbreaking detail, as she desperately attempts to fight her numbness by entering into increasingly risky sexual encounters.

Suze’s story is threaded to the next, Translated from the Bottle Journals, by way of her landscape artist father, who 30 years previous corresponded with a dying Italian painter, who is renowned for painting the same objects his entire career — a small group of bottles. It is through his musings that the novel draws its title — indeed, from an art textbook.

“In Il Libro dell’Arte, Cennini teaches us how to paint wounds, using unalloyed vermilion as the base, and lac resin applied sparingly, so the blood continues to shine. To look inside those red windows at the Uffizi today is to witness five-hundred-year-old pain as if it were a harm committed today. In these preparatory passages there is also a section on how to paint a dead man. I have often wondered if the condition of death is perhaps less grave to the human anatomy than physical injuries. For in death there is release from suffering. Sadly, the master craftsman is unable to instruct us in the healing of wounds.”

The third strand, The Fool on the Hill, follows the landscape artist, Peter, as he struggles with an ironic twist of fate. Venturing out to sketch another of his now-famous landscapes in the rugged terrain of Cumbria, he finds himself trapped after a fall. The countryside that has been his inspiration may prove his downfall.

Finally, The Divine Vision of Annette Tambroni closes the link with a young girl whose sight has deteriorated through a genetic disorder that leaves her now blind. She was inspired by visits to her school from the Italian artist, and now tends his grave. Overprotected by her religious mother, tales of the ‘Bestia’ depicted in a painting in her church occupy her mind. Is that the presence she feels nearby?

A chapter from each strand alternate, which does mean concentration is necessary to keep them straight at first. Once underway, however, their relationship unfolds and illuminates. Perhaps more questions are left than answered. But I couldn’t get this novel out of my head for days.

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